Submitted by Tonja Koob Marking, Ph.D., PE, D.WRE, DFE, MBA, PMP, CFM, LEED AP, F.ASCE to the Winter 2024 Currents
The Brooklyn Waterworks was the City of Brooklyn’s primary water supply system in the second half of the nineteenth century. The water it provided allowed Brooklyn’s population to grow from 96,838 in 1850 to 1.1 million in 1898, making it the third-largest city in the country by the time it joined New York City. Its water supplied the steam engines that made Brooklyn an industrial powerhouse, and that same water allowed Brooklyn to become the largest beer producing city in the United States.
The Brooklyn Waterworks’ period of significance was from 1856, when construction of the Ridgewood Reservoir began, to 1959, when the Ridgewood Reservoir’s basins became reserves for use in emergencies. Until then, the reservoir’s three stone-faced basins collected water for distribution into all of Brooklyn for nearly a century. The Ridgewood Reservoir was officially decommissioned in 1989.
Six reservoirs were originally planned for the Brooklyn Waterworks, each named by the source of its feeding stream. The ponds were drained to remove hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of mud and rotting vegetation. Initially, water from Baisley and Simonson’s ponds was thought to be a sufficient supply, but by the 1860’s, the works had to be extended eastward to Hempstead Pond. Demand for water increased due to population and per capita consumption, and to demands of Brooklyn’s thriving industries and breweries.
A major factor in the increased demand was indoor plumbing and flush toilets became more widespread in the 1860s. To meet this demand, nine additional reservoirs were added and the system eventually reached east to Massapequa Pond (built 1888) on the Nassau and Suffolk County border.
To supplement water from the fifteen reservoirs, 25 ground water pumping stations were added. An aqueduct was built to convey the water from east to west along what is now Sunrise Highway and Conduit Avenue. Constructed with brick, it was 5 feet high and 4 feet, 10 inches wide and shaped like an inverted horseshoe, similar to the Croton Aqueduct built in 1842. The aqueduct was originally planned to be an open channel but the design was changed to below grade for security and to prevent water from freezing in the winter.
The topography of southern Nassau and Queens Counties was so flat that water had to be pumped through the aqueduct by steam engines at coal-fired stations located next to each reservoir. The fuel costs were substantial. In 1917, the year that Catskill water was directly connected to the Ridgewood Reservoir, the City of New York saved $500,000 in fuel costs because Catskill water was delivered by gravity and did not require pumping. The largest and most impressive of the pumping stations was the Milburn Pumping Station. The Brooklyn aqueduct terminated at what is now the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Logan Street. There, two pumping stations, one built in 1858 and one in 1891, pumped water up to the reservoir 164 feet above via pipes that ran along Force Tube Avenue.
By 1883, the total system cost was $11,743,393.22. The main conduit stretched 12.39 miles east from the reservoir. When the system opened in 1859 it included 126,916 miles of pipes and mains under city streets and 800 hydrants; by 1883, it had grown to 231,106 miles of pipes and 2,170 hydrants.
ASCE designated the Brooklyn Waterworks a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 2021.
